Page 8 of Snake

“I’m gonna say something you won’t like,” Tally said as he tried to make sense of the bottle. He glared at her, and she looked afraid, but she pressed on. “You know like I know—better than I do—that she’s never gonna come back from Billy. She’s miserable, Cox. She’s broken. Not just her heart. Everything. She hasn’t wanted to be here for twenty years, and it’s been thirty since she was happy. Maybe it’s time to just let her g—”

Cox roared and punched the wall beside Tally’s head. Then he threw the pill bottle on the floor and stormed out of her kitchen.

He went back to take care of his mom. He’d make her a nice dinner, change her bed linens, maybe coax her into a bath while he cleaned the kitchen. Get her to see things a little more brightly.

Because she was not fucking leaving him. Not her too.

Chapter Two

Autumn rolled her eyes as she passed the Welcome to Signal Bend! sign and its cheerily cutesy steam train coming around a bend, where a bright signal light showed it the way. Little bit on the nose, huh? The people of Signal Bend were not into subtlety—or style, for that matter. They leaned all the way in on the kitsch, in the proud, cluelessly unironic way of true believers.

In all honestly, when she’d first discovered the place, she’d been charmed; Signal Bend and its people were like a 1950s Technicolor musical starring Shirley Jones or Doris Day. The architecture in the main part of town was full of cute little touches with either Scandinavian or Victorian flair—gingerbread corners, wraparound porches, turned dowel railings, stained glass, the works. So cute!

There was a slowness to the place, too, that had a hint of vacation in it—the kind of indolent busyness one experienced at a tropical resort or mountain cabin. In her daily life, Autumn was busy from the moment she woke each day until she switched off her bedside lamp at night, and she was sure she’d be bored out of her head if her life moved more slowly. But for a week or two of vacation, she was happy to laze on the beach all day (okay, yes, with her laptop open on her legs). Before Signal Bend had proved to be a thorn in her side, she’d enjoyed its mellow vibe—and that first impression had made her even more committed to getting this deal done.

On her first time in town, when she’d made a point to drive every street and get as clear a sense of the place she could, she’d come across one house that had caused her to slam on the breaks and get out of her rental car to explore. It reminded her keenly of the house from It’s a Wonderful Life—clearly abandoned, halfway down the road to ruin, but what a beauty it must once have been. She adored finding old things and giving them new life; her heart ached for what that house had once been and could again be. That house deserved to be loved. It was a tragedy the town was just letting it rot.

They’d been letting the property she’d bought rot for years as well. Even so, they’d been maniacally committed to preventing her from buying it and making something new.

After half a year of trying to close a deal here, she had grown to loathe this theme park of a nowhere town and all the inbred hicks who made up its meager population. And they didn’t like her any better. Of course, they treated her like a pariah, while she kept a friendly smile plastered on her face.

She’d been in commercial real estate since grad school, and she was no stranger to protests from the NIMBY types. Such people always wanted more convenient shopping and services, but they always wanted it built ‘over there, not here.’ Negotiating that resistance was a normal part of her work. But in Signal Bend the resistance had been infuriatingly intractable, all because of fewer than twenty men: The Night Horde MC. They ruled this town like kings, and they wanted no part of her first Heartland Homestead project.

She’d been getting increasingly threatening demands from Chase to close the deal before he pulled the plug on the whole project, and the past month or so had been full of sleepless nights as she fretted that the project truly had failed before it had a chance.

But the tide had finally, unexpectedly turned. Thanks to the sudden death of the previous mayor, who’d been so far up the Horde’s butt he could have checked their teeth for cavities from the back, she finally had a closed deal, signed and notarized, with his successor. Whether the bikers liked it or not, the first Heartland Homestead would be built right here in Signal Bend, Missouri.

She didn’t feel remotely guilty for celebrating the death of Mayor Hopkins. That happy fool had been bought and paid for, and the Horde had kept hold of the receipt. He could rot.

For the next year or so, she was going to be spending a lot of time in this place and with its people. Good thing she, unlike most of the yahoos in Signal Bend, was extremely practiced in keeping her true feelings under wraps.

Not wanting to draw attention to herself as she drove through town, she put up her window and turned down her music. Once she remembered how to do both those things. She’d rented this Audi at the St. Louis airport, and every new rental required a lesson on how the buttons and knobs—and/or touch screen, depending on the model—worked.

Every trip, she told herself she’d just drive the whole way. It was less than six hours by car, and she drove two of those hours from St. Louis when she flew in. Once she factored in all the time on the ground it took to fly anywhere, it was a ridiculous waste of time to fly into Missouri.

But Autumn had been in a pretty terrible accident while she was in college, driving home from Cornell. She’d fallen asleep at the wheel while driving through Ohio and woken in a hospital two days later, and she’d spent the next three weeks there. She’d nodded off, fallen into a real sleep, and the car had gone off the road and straight into the concrete pylon of an overpass. In broad daylight.

Boredom made her sleepy. Any prolonged stillness tended to knock her out; she’d never yet spent more than about thirty minutes on a plane without napping, unless she had a travel companion who kept her alert. She could go longer when she drove, with the radio on and up-tempo music playing she could sing along with. But since the day of the accident, she’d avoided driving anywhere alone longer than about two hours.

So every time she traveled to Signal Bend, she wasted an entire day, landed in St. Louis, rented a nice car, and drove the rest of the way.

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

It was Thursday afternoon, and Main Street looked like backstage at a movie studio. The town’s ‘Spring Fling’ started tomorrow, and apparently most of the town was involved in the preparations. Shops were open, and there was plenty of foot traffic, but around that regular activity were dozens of people—several of them in black leather vests—hanging garlands and lights and banners, wrapping swaths of brightly colored plastic, like giant ribbon, around signposts and pillars.

Seriously. Autumn expected Robert Preston to strut down the middle of Main Street any second, leading seventy-six trombones. As an avid fan of musicals (she’d been raised by two gay men; of course she was both a fan and vastly well versed in them all), she would normally have been delighted by all the quaint fuss, and she had been when she’d first explored this town. But six months of frustration and abuse had tainted her every view of this town with a veneer of filth.

As she passed the town park and all its spring-fling bustle, she turned off the main road and headed into a small, charming residential area and onto a seemingly forgotten, dead-end block at the back. There were only three houses here, none of them occupied. One of the houses had captured her imagination. It had become a little ritual to park in front of that fascinating old relic for a few minutes and imagine plans she’d make to restore it.

Though the townspeople here would probably fight it as well, she could track down the owner (it was probably the town itself, anyway, just like the lot she’d bought), make an offer, and flip the house. She’d likely make a nice profit, and she’d have a blast doing the work. But MWGP didn’t work individual residential deals, and she didn’t have time to take on a project like this outside of work.

Also, she didn’t want anybody else to have that house. It would never be hers; she didn’t live anywhere near this town, and she absolutely did not want to. But as long as it was derelict, she could tell herself it wasn’t not hers. And have this little daydreamy ritual to soothe herself before she entered the Thunderdome that was Signal Bend.

She got the Audi moving again and continued on her way to Keller Acres Bed & Breakfast, the only guest accommodations in town.

---